Sundance 2024: Handling the Undead, Desire Lines, A Different Man

While most of the dispatches from Sundance this year have been built around three films from a single Sundance program like U.S. Dramatic Competition or Premieres, that kind of structure inherently leaves a few orphans, films without dispatch partners in cinematic crime. So this is a final, grab-bag dispatch, featuring an excellent film from the World Dramatic Competition, an ambitious one from NEXT, and one I expect to be divisive from Premieres.

More of a slow chill than a slow burn, one wouldn’t have to know that “Handling the Undead” is based on a book by the same author as “Let the Right One In” to guess it. As he did with vampires in that tale, John Adjvide Lindqvist used the concept of zombies in his book in a way to analyze something emotionally human instead of supernatural. While this excellent mood piece eventually features the walking dead, it’s more about how people respond both to death and the possibility of reversing it. It’s an incredibly somber film, one washed in hues of blue and green, and it gets under your skin, making you question how you would react if you could have more time with a lost loved one, even if you knew immediately there would be a cost.

Director Thea Hvistendahl technically reunites the stars of “The Worst Person in the World”—Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie—but they don’t share any scenes in this ensemble piece of storytelling about an impossible day in Oslo, Norway. Before the film turns, which is relatively far into its drama for a film that could technically be called horror, “Handling the Undead” is a domestic grief drama. Reinsve plays a woman who recently lost a child; Lie one who is unexpectedly about to lose his wife. Like a woman across town who has lost her partner too, these people feel like zombies, already on the thin line between life and death—Reinsve’s character takes a drastic action to join her son in one of the most shocking scenes of the festival.

And then the recently-dead wake up. Sorta. They don’t speak, and barely move. They are shells of human beings, leading to thematic analysis about what it means to get people back. Are these really the same people? How would you feel if you got the shell of your loved one back, but not what made them your loved one? It creates an interesting story of healing, almost religious in its depiction of people whose bodies may return but their souls clearly have not. Hvistendahl is so patient with her imagery, mood, and characters, never afraid to allow us to simply sit in this impossible space, until we can almost feel a chill in the air.

Jules Rosskam has made an excellent documentary about gender expression, sexuality, and trans identity in “Desire Lines,” but it’s also embedded in a narrative feature that doesn’t work quite as well. While I’m generally a big fan of hybrid doc/feature productions, the latter here feels less refined than the former due to some awkward performances and clunky dialogue. The interview footage here, both archival and new, with trans people speaking openly about their issues with sexuality, is fantastic. And it feels like there was an understandable desire to not restrain a film that’s so heavily about physical interaction with a talking-head structure, mixing the intellectual conversation with erotic storytelling. The ambition is as high as anything I saw at Sundance, and that alone makes this work a look.

Rosskam’s approach is two-fold, intercutting interviews about transmasculine sexual history and behavior with a fictional interaction between characters played by Theo Germaine and Aden Hakimi. Both halves of the film feel like they’re trying to playfully unpack the complexity of the transmasculine sexual experience, revealing how silly it is to paint any gender identity with a broad brush. Trans identity allows for an array of desires, proclivities, beliefs, and dreams, and “Desire Lines” succeeds by tearing down the clichés that makes any classification of people into a monolith.

The material between Hakimi and Germaine, while well-performed, feels a bit clunky, more like a student film than the deep intellectualism in the documentary portions of the production. I just wanted them to be a bit further refined, and less self-aware. The best moments in “Desire Lines” come from spontaneous admissions, stories of past or desired behavior that often come with a laugh and a smile. It’s at its most essential when it’s about freedom of expression, completely devoid of judgment or expectation. Representation must come with that kind of freedom, and “Desire Lines” is a joyous step toward both.

Finally, there’s one of the major premieres of Sundance 2024, A24’s “A Different Man,” a dramedy that allows Sebastian Stan one of his richest roles to date. It’s a film that gets more meta as it spins its ideas into a chaotic final act that I believe gets away from writer/director Aaron Schimberg a bit more than it should, but I still admire the performances and ideas in this unusual film.

Stan plays an actor named Edward with a facial deformity so drastic that he struggles to find work and happiness. In an almost Charlie Kaufman-esque set-up, Edward’s life is just surreal enough to be unrealistic. Like the characters in something like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Edward is given what feels like an impossible gift, a surgical procedure that will transform his appearance into the movie-star looks of Stan. The problem? He’s still Edward on the inside.